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132 9 The Ideology of the Benevolent Empire The Social Gospel The Social Gospel seeped into South African Christianity almost unnoticed, and, perhaps for this reason, has been all but ignored by historians. In the early decades of the twentieth century, many missionaries in South Africa were expanding their faith into sponsorship of social change. Some missionaries, particularly the Americans, called this the Social Gospel. In South Africa, a few called it Social Christianity. Most gave it no name at all. Yet before the Second World War, few intellectual developments in South Africa had greater influence on blackwhite relations.1 The Social Gospel in Two Versions Early twentieth-century missionaries in South Africa produced little independent theological reflection and relied heavily on imported notions, chiefly from the transatlantic network of English-speaking Protestants. In Britain and North America, the principal Protestant churches had, since the 1890s, been turning to the Social Gospel to combat the perceived evils of industrial society. In 1907, one of its more radical advocates, the American Baptist theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, denounced gross inequalities in landholding, “ugly, depressing, coarsening” factory work, periodic unemployment, declining purchasing power of workers’ wages, undernourishment and overworking of women, and neglect of children’s health. A “wedge of inequality” threatened to polarize society and undermine democracy while corrupting morals through competition and greed. This, for Rauschenbusch, was the seamy side of the “age of progress,” that the churches would ignore at their peril.2 Simultaneously, the German “higher critical” analysis of the Bible was making headway in English-speaking countries. Darwin’s evolutionary theories, which some considered a threat to the coexistence of science and religion, were also gaining influence. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, traditional Protestantism seemed unable to address the crisis of industrialization and the intellectual doubts of many churchgoers. Misgivings were particularly strong among evangelicals, such as the Methodists, who had relied on mass revivals to impress Christian values upon society. Increasingly, well-educated Christians perceived The Social Gospel 133 revivals, with their reliance on emotions and elementary theology, as ineffective, even embarrassing. In response, many clergy in North America and Europe now inverted the traditional formula of revivalism—that transformation of society would flow from individual conversions—to declare social reform a precondition of individual redemption, and not only for the oppressed.3 Many began to stress the “immanence” (presence) rather than the transcendence of God—a God who could save individuals from sin, but one who could also save society from injustice , thereby ushering in the Kingdom of God on earth. John R. Mott, the international mission leader who soon had decisive influence on South African Christianity, no longer emphasized personal salvation as he had in his early ministry and in his classic 1900 book, The Evangelization of the World in This Generation. By 1908, he was proclaiming that “the social aspects of the programme of Christianity constitute one of the distinctive calls of our generation.”4 So influential did the Social Gospel become in the United States that in 1908 the newly created Federal Council of Churches in the United States, speaking for 17 million Protestants, adopted a “Social Creed of the Churches” that committed the council’s member denominations to “the most equitable division of the product of industry that can ultimately be devised.”5 In England, where the churches faced a working-class flight from Christianity more threatening than any in America, the Social Gospel movement, though interdenominational, became particularly strong in the Church of England, sometimes with an Anglo-Catholic flavor that would heavily influence the South African Anglican Church and its missions. Many English churches, deriding traditional Christian charity as mere “ambulance work,” mounted a theological critique of individualism and private property, exhorted employers to pay their workers a “living wage,” and advocated moderately socialist measures, such as worker participation in industrial management and taxes on inherited wealth.6 The Church of Scotland decided, in 1904, to replace evangelistic programs with “social work in homes and ‘labour colonies’ for the elderly, disabled, inebriate, delinquent and unemployed.” Four years later, the United Free Church of Scotland , whose missionaries managed the educational center at Lovedale in South Africa, set up a Committee on Social Problems, and inquired into “housing conditions , unemployment, child welfare, and allied matters.”7 To many conservatives, the Social Gospel was a stalking-horse for liberal or modernist theology. Yet numerous theological liberals had scant interest in the Social Gospel,8 and some theological conservatives, such as officers...

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